Ares' gameplan, Honkai: Star Rail drama, Moonton's Savvy sale, Rovio's write-down, DICE awards, more

Hello and welcome to the mobile gamer.biz digest. I'm Neil Long and every week I go for a walk and tell you what's happening in the mobile games industry. Here we go. You may sense a slightly different atmosphere in the podcast this week. Last week came to you from Las Vegas. This week the Cotsworlds. It's raining and it's dark and I'm technically on holiday. So, it's been a lighter week of content this week, but I did post an interview I did at DICE last week with Mike Dat of Aries Interactive fame, but also many other mobile games companies, BAM, Scopely, Mattel. He set up a mobile game publisher called Rogue Games. And he worked with Nicolo Damasi, boss of Glue, many moons ago. and now he's back working with Massie at Aries Interactive. I've already done a couple

of reports on on this publisher. Back in May 2025, the company was technically in stealth, but I did a little report on DAT joining and Damasi also hiring a load of other Exglue people there. And since then, the company has announced a $70 million funding round. And the conversation I had with DAT last week filled in a few other gaps in the Aries interactive story. So they acquired Swift Games based in Berlin and its game Heroes and Hordes last year. They are now running that game or vampire survivors type game which is making decent money according to Dat. They aqua hired the team at seventh inning which is effectively the core team that used to run tap sports baseball for glue. They are based in San

Francisco. Five of the core team were aqua hired. The rest are hired later on. Baseball hits 26 is coming out next month I believe when the baseball season starts. And for those wondering if $70 million is enough of a fund raise in today's climate, Dat seemed to be pretty cool about that figure. And also I asked him is that all getting spent on UA? Is that enough money? And his answer was no. The money will not be spent on UA. General Catalyst is one of the main backers of Areas Interactive and they also have a UA financing operation. General Catalyst has a thing called the Consumer Value Fund, CVF. They work with developers who want to spend at least 2 million a month on UA, which is more than fellow UA financing company PVX,

which works in the 500k to 2 million range. Incidentally, General Catalyst is also an investor in PVX. So, it's all coming from the same bucket. Eventually, Dilap puts it in a quite a fun way. He says, quote, "It's the kind of model where they give you the capital and if you have the basic KPIs, you can go crazy and that 70 million will be spent on approaching more publishing talent and maybe buying or at least aqua hiring more studios. So that's the UA question ticked off and of course you have to ask anyone involved in glue and the Kim Kardashian Hollywood years if they are thinking about replicating that with your new celebrity game or another Kim game. I did ask for good reason. Damasi teased exactly that when I asked him a couple of years ago about the rise and fall of Kim

Kardashian Hollywood and all the other celebrity kind of musician games that Glue ran back in the day. Dat who lives in LA and literally next door to someone in Kim Kardashian's team. He said, "Yeah, why not? Of course, we would like a game of that scale with that kind of profile. And in terms of being a publisher, it is looking to lean on recognizable IP. He says it could be a celebrity. It could be anything. An IP, a movie, a TV show, toy brand, board game. I think anything that's recognizable from people's childhood or that they have nostalgia for. So, yeah. Aries Interactive built by some as glue 2.0. 0. I think this is a fun story with some familiar faces involved who have been around in the business and know what's what. A lot more detail in the article on the site. Give it a read.

Something a little different from Monday. I have been commissioning Anna Diaz, formerly of Polygon, to cover a few areas where I don't have the deep knowledge that they do on big service games like Genshin Impact, Hongai Star Rail, Roblox, etc., etc. and they got in touch to say that Hongai Star Rail has been caught up in some sort of Japan China international political incident which I had not seen reported anywhere at all. This kind of stuff often only exists in Discords and on Reddit threads. Only people deep in the community pull this stuff out and bring attention to it. So Anna wrote this up as a story on the site on Monday and essentially it boils down to the big 4.0 update which game lore and teasers up until this point had

suggested would be a Japan themed content update and season. That update got delayed by two weeks which is very unusual for Hoyverse. And when the content update did arrive, the Japanese theming of it all seemed to have disappeared, which has led fans to believe that this is part of an escalation of tensions between China and Japan, which has been happening on the political stage in the last few weeks. The implication is that China does not want to be celebrating Japanese culture in the current political climate. Obviously, we asked Hoyver for a comment on this story and why the content appears to have changed, but yeah, an interesting one. So, have a look at the report on the site. interesting stuff and a a reminder that perhaps the

Chinese government's influence over its cultural exports is always there and perhaps at times it exerts its power on Chinese companies in let's say fun and interesting ways. Exola connects developers with the resources they need to build, fund, launch, and monetize their mobile games globally with Exola Web Shop. Sell virtual items, in-game currency, subscriptions, and custom offers directly to players while driving up to five times the revenue growth. With the industry's number one web shop solution, Exola provides the tools for developers to focus on what's most important, creating great games. Visit exola.com to learn more. That's xsol.com. Arguably the biggest news nuggets of the week are actually tucked away in the

data digest roundup from Wednesday. Big one, I guess, is Savvy, owner of Scopely and Niantics game portfolio, now in the mix to buy Moon, maker of Mobile Legends Bang Bang, for up to $7 billion. I mean, if you compare the numbers, Scopely looks like a bargain considering Savvy bought Scopely for 4.9 billion and it has a big roster of games, including Monopoly Go, of course. But Moon is effectively Mobile Legends Bang Bang, and that's it. So 7 billion seems like a lot, but it's obviously making good money in China. And in terms of a divestment, it's notable in that Bite Dance, owner of Tik Tok, has been restructuring and selling off bits of its mobile game business to get out of mobile games. So, Moonton's sale would represent the last

bit of that going away. It does still own Newver, I believe, but no longer publishes Marvel Snap, which was that label's major title. So, Tik Tok backing out of games and Savvy growing its empire. This is according to a Reuters report, I should say, and the deal is reportedly ready and going through potentially this quarter. Perhaps the biggest news in data digest this week. It's been reported elsewhere a lot as well, but Sega effectively wrote down the value of Roio by $200 million. The company blamed competition in the market particularly for UA. And there's actually quite a helpful graph that Sega has provided showing the sales trend and its decline pretty much at the point

ROIO joined Sega. So they have helpfully flagged up where White Out Survival, Monopoly Go, Last War Survival, Squadbusters, and Royal Kingdom were released in this graph. ROIO's sales kind of just consistently decline from that point onwards. Apparently due to the competition from those titles, but it's fair to say Roio hasn't had a hit. Also within the financials, that Sonic Rumble game, which is kind of Sonic does four guys, has not worked out. That might even close down fairly quickly given the volume of installs and revenue it is generating. Sega also described Romeo's Q3 performance as sluggish. Future game development will focus on Angry Birds and Sega IPs, including Sonic. And Roio has also appointed Daniel Svad, hope I'm saying that okay,

from King as its chief operating officer. So tricky times for ROIO there. In other financial news, Liftoff has canled its IPO entirely. So, this follows on from the news of the IPO, which if you are a regular listener to this podcast, I was slightly surprised this company was big enough to IPO. And then last week, it turned out that Liftoff was delaying its IPO due to a selloff in software as a service type companies on the stock market. And then it turns out this week the IPO is canceled entirely. So liftoff no longer going public. Some other good nuggets of news in data digest this week. Habby two billion in lifetime user spending according to app magagic. Most of that money is from survivor.io and archer. The Fallout TV show apparently boosted Fallout Shelter inapp purchase revenue.

The second series did not have the same impact as the first and overall the revenue spike is notable but not huge. Elsewhere in the data digest you got mobile up 7% at Ubisoft in that company's financials. Apploving absolutely smashing it revenue up 70% to 5.48 billion. Croftton also seeing mobile revenue rise 1.2 billion for FY 2025. Embraces mobile game sales fell 66% in Q3. And Nexon record revenue there thanks to the new Maple Story game, Dungeon and Fighter and of course Arc Raiders on PC console. Loads more interesting nuggets in there. Full detail and big numbers in the report on the website. In the soft launch article this week, a

new robot battle arena game from Boombit and three new soft launches from Merge Mansion Maker Metacor. Interesting what Metacor appears to be doing with its games. It now has effectively the same game out but reskinned four different times around four different themes. You can see even in the store screenshots that the screenshots have been flipped and assets have been replaced. So, we shall see if that works out as a strategy for them. They removed Grandma's Solitaire Stories from Soft Launcher after quite a long time. So, let's see if another hit game can come out of Helsinki. And of course elsewhere in that article, you've got your usual soft launches from the likes of Playrex, Mini Clip, Supercell, Zingga, and nothing from EA anymore. EA Sports

FC Tactical used to be in there, but it's now been removed. That was like a strategy style spin-off of EA Sports FC, but now that's been canned by the looks of it. So yeah, plenty more in that article. Have a look. There's quite a few games in there that don't seem like they're ever going to launch now. So that story is updated every other Monday. Hopefully a useful resource. Finally, I did promise last week some bonus thoughts from DICE. Last week's podcast was recorded after lots of game industry leaders took to the stage to talk about their memories of Vince Zmpella and how he had inspired them before his untimely death at the end of 2025. There was also some good talks from the people who made Ark Raiders, the indie creator behind a game called Consume Me, the story lead on Clare Obscure, and

also a very charismatic Australian guy making a game called Mixtape. Uh, very entertaining stuff. I wrote all of that up for a industry newsletter called Knowledge, which is related to Edge magazine, the longrunning British games magazine. I used to run the Edge website 12 years ago now. So quite fun to be back writing for a Edge magazine adjacent outlet like Knowledge. have a read if you're interested in the wider thoughts and feelings of people at DICE. But specifically on mobile, the mobile game of the year category at the DICE summit was quite an odd mix of games and there was only four games nominated. Oman Misumi, What the Clash, the Apple Arcade game, the adventure winner, the Persona mobile game that's knocking around. And another one, I think it was

like Weathering Waves or something, but quite an odd choice of games for the mobile category. And I don't want to bang on about why mobile games don't get awards anymore. I think that conversation is thoroughly played out. But if you are going to do an awards category for mobile, maybe you should at least include more than four games. All the other categories had five, sometimes six nominees, which suggests the panel deciding these things maybe just didn't know more than four mobile games coming out in the last year. I don't know. But I mean, if anyone from the DICE committee is listening, I'd be happy to help beef up some of your mobile options because yeah, the nominees were strange. And the eventual winner, Persona, quite a strange choice because it's made very little impact as far as I'm aware at

least in the market. But these are sort of art and craft game design type awards and I'm told it's very good by a person who is familiar with the game. So, who am I to complain? But yeah, mobile definitely represented at the DICE awards, but not as far as I'm aware in any of the other 20 or so categories. So, you know, maybe I should just do the mobile gamer.biz awards and sort all of this stuff out myself. Or maybe not. It looks like a lot of hassle. That's it for this week. A slightly shorter edition. I am technically supposed to be on holiday. Normal service will resume next week. Thank you.